Was Twentieth-Century Australian Racism A Myth?
Keith Windschuttle, The Australian, 12/06/04
Unless they have taken a university course in history in recent decades, most Australians would be surprised to learn they inhabit one of the world's most shamefully racist countries.
The academic consensus today is that the White Australia Policy -- a series of restrictions on non-white immigrants dating from the gold rushes of the 1850s and culminating in the commonwealth's Immigration Restriction Bill of 1901 -- made this country the moral equivalent of South Africa under apartheid. Some historians even label Australia at Federation one of the"herrenvolk democracies" -- a direct comparison with the"master race" nationalism of Nazi Germany.
Moreover, the White Australia Policy purportedly lives on today. The near-unanimous opinion of an academic history conference in December 2001 was that John Howard's border protection measures tapped into deeply embedded sentiments of"blood and race" to ensure his election victory that year."One hundred years after the passage of the Immigration Restriction Act," quipped conference speaker Sean Brawley,"earlier reports of the demise of the White Australia Policy were premature."
Other prominent historians who support this interpretation include Henry Reynolds who claims the 1901 bill represented"the messianic pursuit of racial purity". Andrew Markus, Richard Broome, Richard White and others allege the dominant racial concept in 19th-century Australia was social Darwinism, the most brutal of all the theories about race that emerged at the time.
This thesis arose on the radical fringe of Australian historiography in the 1960s. Lacking any effective criticism, it has gradually made its way from one more extreme position to another. Today, the interpretation has become mainstream and university and high school teachers repeat it unchallenged.
But anyone who looks at the evidence with a sceptical eye will find the case so exaggerated it defies credibility. In their enthusiasm to play politics, academics have misread their culture and misunderstood their history.
A more plausible scenario is the following:
From 1788 onwards, the Australian colonies were always multiracial. As well as Aborigines, many non-white people from across the British Empire walked the streets of the early colonies. From the outset, Sydney had highly visible populations of Maoris, Tahitians, Indians, Ceylonese, American negroes, West Indians, and Africans from Cape Town and Mauritius. At least 1000 of the convicts sent to Australia before 1850 were not white. From the 1850s to the 1890s the Chinese constituted the second biggest foreign-born population in Australia, exceeded only by those born in the British Isles.
In the 19th century, the principal objections to non-white immigrants came from trade unions and labour movement politicians. They objected to Chinese immigrants not primarily because of their race but because many were" coolies", indentured labourers recruited in their home country at wages a fraction of Australian market rates, which left them an impoverished underclass. The union campaign against coolie labour was at the time a progressive movement to extend the freedom and dignity of labour, in the same mould as those to end black slavery and convict transportation.
Apart from two incidents on the goldfields in 1857 and 1861, there was no serious mob violence in Australia perpetrated by whites against non-whites. In both of the goldfields cases, colonial governments defended the Chinese victims, compensated them for their losses and took action against the white perpetrators. By far the most violent race riots in Australian history took place in the early 20th century when on three separate occasions the Japanese population of Broome took up arms against the Koepangers or Timorese, with fatalities on both sides. Elsewhere in northern Australia, there were substantial Asian populations in the 19th century, but no incidents of racial violence.
The Melanesian labourers who came from the New Hebrides and the Solomon Islands to work in Queensland's early sugar industry were not kidnapped and were never slaves. The familiar story of Kanaka"blackbirding" is a myth. Nonetheless, the commonwealth's decision to deport the majority of Pacific Islanders between 1904 and 1908 was a genuine injustice to a largely assimilated population.
From the 1900s until World War II, the main focus of the White Australia Policy shifted from China to Japan. Over this period, Japan was an aggressively nationalist and rapidly expanding imperial power in East and Southeast Asia, which had established population enclaves in Broome and on Australian territory in Torres Strait. Australian concerns about Japanese imperial ambitions were far from the neurotic anxiety mocked by today's historians. They constituted a sober recognition of the strategic realities of the Asia-Pacific region post-1905.
Mainstream Australian nationalism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was not based on race and bore no parallels to the ideologies that emerged in Germany and some other European countries. Instead of racial nationalism, Australian identity was based on a civic patriotism, which encouraged loyalty not to race or ethnicity but to Australia's liberal democratic political institutions. Australians also owed loyalty to the British Empire, which specifically rejected the notion of hierarchies of race.
The greatest enthusiasts for White Australia, and the genuine racists of the time, were the members of the late 19th century republican Left, especially its writers, artists and other intellectuals. Their strongest opponents were traditional liberals, the purported reactionaries of their era who supported free enterprise against the growing power of the state.
Rather than the widely accepted theory claimed by historians, social Darwinism was something few Australians at the time had ever heard of. Its adherents were a small group of intellectuals at the extremes of opinion. Instead, the most familiar explanations of racial and cultural difference derived from the Scottish Enlightenment, which argued that the inferiority of some societies and cultures derived from the stage of history they occupied and was changeable, rather than grounded in biology and permanent.
Modern historians have seriously misrepresented the debate in the commonwealth Parliament over the 1901 Immigration Restriction Bill. While Labor leader Chris Watson and Protectionist Prime Minister Edmund Barton both made overtly racist arguments, the majority of parliamentary opinion was not"pervaded with ideas of race and blood", as historians claim. Two-thirds of the parliamentarians wanted to exclude Asian immigrants primarily because they would undermine the standard of living of Australian working people. Of almost equal concern was their fear that the creation of a racially based political underclass would undermine democratic egalitarianism. The Labor Party was most in favour of the bill and the Free Trade Party its strongest opponent.
Because Australian political identity was based on civic patriotism rather than racial nationalism, the White Australia Policy could be readily discarded once the political decision was made. Immigration restrictions were gradually liberalised, starting with the Menzies government in the mid-1950s and completed by the Whitlam government, with Coalition support, in 1975. Ending the policy required no cultural crisis and was accomplished by liberal politicians from both sides of parliament whose values were similar to those of the 1901 bill's original critics. The proof that Australia wore the policy lightly was the ease with which it discarded it.
Overall, the White Australia Policy had aspects that were both reactionary and progressive, discriminatory and humane. But its history shows no deep-seated racism has ever lurked permanently at the core of Australian culture.
Unless they have taken a university course in history in recent decades, most Australians would be surprised to learn they inhabit one of the world's most shamefully racist countries.
The academic consensus today is that the White Australia Policy -- a series of restrictions on non-white immigrants dating from the gold rushes of the 1850s and culminating in the commonwealth's Immigration Restriction Bill of 1901 -- made this country the moral equivalent of South Africa under apartheid. Some historians even label Australia at Federation one of the"herrenvolk democracies" -- a direct comparison with the"master race" nationalism of Nazi Germany.
Moreover, the White Australia Policy purportedly lives on today. The near-unanimous opinion of an academic history conference in December 2001 was that John Howard's border protection measures tapped into deeply embedded sentiments of"blood and race" to ensure his election victory that year."One hundred years after the passage of the Immigration Restriction Act," quipped conference speaker Sean Brawley,"earlier reports of the demise of the White Australia Policy were premature."
Other prominent historians who support this interpretation include Henry Reynolds who claims the 1901 bill represented"the messianic pursuit of racial purity". Andrew Markus, Richard Broome, Richard White and others allege the dominant racial concept in 19th-century Australia was social Darwinism, the most brutal of all the theories about race that emerged at the time.
This thesis arose on the radical fringe of Australian historiography in the 1960s. Lacking any effective criticism, it has gradually made its way from one more extreme position to another. Today, the interpretation has become mainstream and university and high school teachers repeat it unchallenged.
But anyone who looks at the evidence with a sceptical eye will find the case so exaggerated it defies credibility. In their enthusiasm to play politics, academics have misread their culture and misunderstood their history.
A more plausible scenario is the following:
From 1788 onwards, the Australian colonies were always multiracial. As well as Aborigines, many non-white people from across the British Empire walked the streets of the early colonies. From the outset, Sydney had highly visible populations of Maoris, Tahitians, Indians, Ceylonese, American negroes, West Indians, and Africans from Cape Town and Mauritius. At least 1000 of the convicts sent to Australia before 1850 were not white. From the 1850s to the 1890s the Chinese constituted the second biggest foreign-born population in Australia, exceeded only by those born in the British Isles.
In the 19th century, the principal objections to non-white immigrants came from trade unions and labour movement politicians. They objected to Chinese immigrants not primarily because of their race but because many were" coolies", indentured labourers recruited in their home country at wages a fraction of Australian market rates, which left them an impoverished underclass. The union campaign against coolie labour was at the time a progressive movement to extend the freedom and dignity of labour, in the same mould as those to end black slavery and convict transportation.
Apart from two incidents on the goldfields in 1857 and 1861, there was no serious mob violence in Australia perpetrated by whites against non-whites. In both of the goldfields cases, colonial governments defended the Chinese victims, compensated them for their losses and took action against the white perpetrators. By far the most violent race riots in Australian history took place in the early 20th century when on three separate occasions the Japanese population of Broome took up arms against the Koepangers or Timorese, with fatalities on both sides. Elsewhere in northern Australia, there were substantial Asian populations in the 19th century, but no incidents of racial violence.
The Melanesian labourers who came from the New Hebrides and the Solomon Islands to work in Queensland's early sugar industry were not kidnapped and were never slaves. The familiar story of Kanaka"blackbirding" is a myth. Nonetheless, the commonwealth's decision to deport the majority of Pacific Islanders between 1904 and 1908 was a genuine injustice to a largely assimilated population.
From the 1900s until World War II, the main focus of the White Australia Policy shifted from China to Japan. Over this period, Japan was an aggressively nationalist and rapidly expanding imperial power in East and Southeast Asia, which had established population enclaves in Broome and on Australian territory in Torres Strait. Australian concerns about Japanese imperial ambitions were far from the neurotic anxiety mocked by today's historians. They constituted a sober recognition of the strategic realities of the Asia-Pacific region post-1905.
Mainstream Australian nationalism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was not based on race and bore no parallels to the ideologies that emerged in Germany and some other European countries. Instead of racial nationalism, Australian identity was based on a civic patriotism, which encouraged loyalty not to race or ethnicity but to Australia's liberal democratic political institutions. Australians also owed loyalty to the British Empire, which specifically rejected the notion of hierarchies of race.
The greatest enthusiasts for White Australia, and the genuine racists of the time, were the members of the late 19th century republican Left, especially its writers, artists and other intellectuals. Their strongest opponents were traditional liberals, the purported reactionaries of their era who supported free enterprise against the growing power of the state.
Rather than the widely accepted theory claimed by historians, social Darwinism was something few Australians at the time had ever heard of. Its adherents were a small group of intellectuals at the extremes of opinion. Instead, the most familiar explanations of racial and cultural difference derived from the Scottish Enlightenment, which argued that the inferiority of some societies and cultures derived from the stage of history they occupied and was changeable, rather than grounded in biology and permanent.
Modern historians have seriously misrepresented the debate in the commonwealth Parliament over the 1901 Immigration Restriction Bill. While Labor leader Chris Watson and Protectionist Prime Minister Edmund Barton both made overtly racist arguments, the majority of parliamentary opinion was not"pervaded with ideas of race and blood", as historians claim. Two-thirds of the parliamentarians wanted to exclude Asian immigrants primarily because they would undermine the standard of living of Australian working people. Of almost equal concern was their fear that the creation of a racially based political underclass would undermine democratic egalitarianism. The Labor Party was most in favour of the bill and the Free Trade Party its strongest opponent.
Because Australian political identity was based on civic patriotism rather than racial nationalism, the White Australia Policy could be readily discarded once the political decision was made. Immigration restrictions were gradually liberalised, starting with the Menzies government in the mid-1950s and completed by the Whitlam government, with Coalition support, in 1975. Ending the policy required no cultural crisis and was accomplished by liberal politicians from both sides of parliament whose values were similar to those of the 1901 bill's original critics. The proof that Australia wore the policy lightly was the ease with which it discarded it.
Overall, the White Australia Policy had aspects that were both reactionary and progressive, discriminatory and humane. But its history shows no deep-seated racism has ever lurked permanently at the core of Australian culture.